However, it seems that things have possibly now changed, with the motivation behind Visceral’s Hardline being down the studio’s own wants.

"The EA that I'm trying to help build isn't an EA that needs to annualize everything," EA Studios executive vice president Patrick Söderlund told Polygon. "It doesn't necessarily mean that we need to annualize Battlefield and that's the way it's going to be forever and ever. I understand that some people may look at it that way but that's what happened.

"Karl-Magnus [Troedsson], who runs DICE studios, and Steve Papoutsis, who runs Visceral, basically met in Barcelona almost three years ago and they came to me [with] the idea of a cops and robbers type Battlefield game.”

Söderlund added that DICE had been playing around with a similar concept for over a decade.

"To the largest extent we can, we want to get the game teams to work on the things they want to work on themselves,” he added.

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